Study recommends rethink of vaccination policy [paper retracted]

Peter

Active Member
here's a study which concludes:

'The number of cases experiencing adverse reactions has been reported to be 700 per 100,000 vaccinations. Currently, we see 16 serious side effects per 100,000 vaccinations, and the number of fatal side effects is at 4.11/100,000 vaccinations. For three deaths prevented by vaccination we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination. Conclusions: This lack of clear benefit should cause governments to rethink their vaccination policy'.

I'm not a very good statistician, but it seems fishy. Anyone care to take a look?

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/693/htm
 
well this jumps out at me. the "assuming". one has to wonder what is happening in the Netherlands to have such a different rate then the ret of the world.

Article:
While the European average is 127 individual case safety reports (ICSRs), i.e., cases with side effect reports, per 100,000 vaccinations, the Dutch authorities have registered 701 reports per 100,000 vaccinations, while Poland has registered only 15 ISCRs per 100,000 vaccinations. Assuming that this difference is not due to differential national susceptibility to vaccination side effects, but due to different national reporting standards, we decided to use the data of the Dutch national register (https://www.lareb.nl/coronameldingen; accessed on 29 May 2021) to gauge the number of severe and fatal side effects per 100,000 vaccinations. We compare these quantities to the NNTV to prevent one clinical case of and one fatality by COVID-19.

1624737961064.png
 
Plus, i dont understand how 'scientists' arrive at their epistomological numbers... but if the R rate is approx 2 world wide. then that would mean that 1 vaccination prevents 2 cases of covid. not "256 vaccinations to prevent 1 case of covid" as this study suggests.

i understand i must be "missing" something. Granted that 1 vaccinated person* might not have caught covid this month, but eventually he would if we had no vaccinations. (unless he's a smoking super-taster with type o blood... i heard these people have less of a chance of catching covid)

*edit add: for clarification: line should read.... "that 1 vaccinated person, if he was never vaccinated"
 
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So, are they implying that there should have been about 6000 deaths caused by vaccinations in the USA? That’s 4 per 100,000 with about 150,000,000 fully vaccinated. I haven’t heard anything so that’s quite the cover up!

Or is it only in Europe where the vaccines are killing people?
 
So, are they implying that there should have been about 6000 deaths caused by vaccinations in the USA? That’s 4 per 100,000 with about 150,000,000 fully vaccinated. I haven’t heard anything so that’s quite the cover up!
I make no claims for the validity of these sites. but.. from here is this claim, 2 weeks old
If we look into COVID19 Deaths in the VAERS dataset there are only 4,946 deaths associated with the COVID19 vaccines. Note, the VAERS database is known to be fairly heavily under reported (1-20% reporting rate)
and there is this graph
1624745666264.png
from this study.
 
The intriguing questions are:
How?
And possibly:
Why?
One of the authors seems to be an alternative medicine crank.

Harald Walach is member of the scientific advisory board of a blog called "CAM-Media Watch" which is run by a Journalist also paid mainly by Heel (corporation). The blog sees itself as "spin doctor" for press on the subject of Complementary and Alternative Medicine ("CAM") and has been reported to also smear a scientist critical of homeopathy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Walach
 
Currently, we see 16 serious side effects per 100,000 vaccinations, and the number of fatal side effects is at 4.11/100,000 vaccinations. For three deaths prevented by vaccination we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination.
Worldwide, the overall death rate now exceeds 500 per 1M population (everyone, not just infected people), which converts to >50/100,000; most Western countries have far more deaths. (Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries ). This outweighs even the serious side effects if we assume that without vaccinations, >25% of the population could still contract Covid.

Obviously, that's a very rough computation that does not consider age groups and their relative likelihood of serious effects of an infection or vaccination. But it does look like they overplay the effects of vaccination compared to infection.

I haven't looked looked at this "study" yet, but another approach equated reports of side effects or deaths with a confirmed causal links. Basically, what happens when a senior gets vaccinated and then drops dead 5 days later, that gets reported as a potential side effect; but actually seniors die all the time, so some will die after their vaccination, simply by random chance. In a previous post on this forum, I've cited the German RKI who examined if people are more likely to die after they've been vaccinated, and failed to find evidence for that.
 
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Regarding the NNTV:

In the Israeli field study, 4460 persons in the vaccination group became infected during the study period and nine persons died, translating into an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.2% in the vaccination group. In the control group, 6100 became infected and 32 died, resulting in an IFR of 0.5%, which is within the range found by a review [11].
Using the data from Table 1, we calculated the absolute risk difference to be 0.00006 (ARD for preventing one death after three to four weeks), which translates into an NNTV of 16,667. The 95% confidence interval spanned the range from 9000 to 50,000. Thus, between 9000 and 50,000 people need to be vaccinated, with a point-estimate of roughly 16,000, to prevent one COVID-19-related death.
[...]
In the Israeli field study, the observation period was six weeks, and in the U.S. regulatory studies between four to six weeks, a period commonly assumed to be sufficient to see a clinical effect of a vaccine, because it would also be the time frame within which someone who was infected initially would fall ill and perhaps die. Had the observation period been longer, the clinical effect size might have increased, i.e., the NNTV could have become lower and, consequently, the ratio of benefit to harm could have increased in favor of the vaccines. However, as noted above, there is also the possibility of side effects developing with some delay and influencing the risk–benefit ratio in the opposite direction. This should be studied more systematically in a long-term observational study.
Content from External Source
They're using a cheap trick here to inflate the NNTV by using the length of the observation period as their time frame. Obviously, if 16000 vaccinations prevent 1 death in 1 month, they should also prevent at least 12 deaths in a year. And the NNTV is also affected by the base infection rate in a country, i.e. if fewer people get infected (due to NPIs), you need to vaccinate more to prevent a death. But if your policy goal is to lift NPIs eventually, you're going to have to assess the effectiveness of the vaccine based on the idea that a large fraction of the population could get infected, which increases the base infection rate and brings the NNTV down dramatically.

To choose the NNTV as a measure for effectiveness is bad because limiting it to a short observation period and NPI-induced low infection base rates artificially hides the true effectiveness of the vaccines.

To compare the NNTV to fatal side effect reports is doubly dishonest because
a) the NNTV has side effect deaths already "baked in", and
b) reports of potential side effects do not equate to confirmed side effects.

I don't think the conclusions of this study are sound.
 
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Thanks Mendel, I suspected as much because the rates they come up with don't seem to reflect reality. I brought this study up because a friend of mine (who is anti-vax) presented it to me as a cause for concern.

I then ran her a few quick and rough calculations to indicate vaccine safety compared to Covid death rate. I used the data available for the Netherlands, as that's where I live.

In the Netherlands, there are 17740 deaths due to corona

15 elderly people died shortly after receiving a vaccination. Lareb (side effects reporting center in NL) states that they see no connection between the vaccination and the deaths, since they were frail and elderly people. But for the sake of this calculation, we'll use 15 deaths anyway.

14.3 million peeps have received at least one dose of vaccination.

So 15 out of 14.300.000 is 0.0001% chance of dying of corona due to vaccination.

About 17 million peeps live in the Netherlands. 1682773 of them contracted Corona, of which 17740 died due to Covid.
So 1.1 percent of the infected population died.

0.0001% or 1.1 %. Which are the better odds? You have a factor 10.000 better chance of surviving vaccination than Corona.


I hope that's an accurate enough indication of the situation.
 
The probability of dying from Covid = A x B, where A is the probability of becoming infected, and B is the probability of dying from Covid if infected. Both A and B are difficult to estimate, and are known to vary with age and other circumstances. But from statistics in countries where testing for the virus is widespread (for example in the UK, where case testing is supplemented by a random weekly survey of the population by the Office for National Statistics), it seems reasonable to put a lower limit of 1% and an upper limit of 5% for B, taken as the average probability of dying if infected. There are admittedly exceptions, like Singapore, which appears to have a death rate among the infected below 0.1%, but one should not rely on exceptions.

Estimating A, the probability of infection, faces a more fundamental difficulty, since it depends in part on the measures taken to control infection, including the take-up and effectiveness of vaccination itself. From the point of view of policy makers, it may be reasonable to compare the outcomes between a given level of vaccination (say, 80% across the population), and a policy of 'do nothing' - no vaccination, no lockdowns, etc. Under a 'do nothing' regime it is plausible that over a year or so at least 50% of the population would be infected, implying a death toll of at least 1% x 50%, i.e. 0.5% of the populating dying. That is far more than any plausible estimate of the death risk from vaccination itself. But from the point of view of the individual, weighing up his or her own interests, it would be tempting to assume that some large proportion of the rest of the population would be vaccinated, which might bring down the probability A for an unvaccinated individual as well. There is an obvious 'free rider' or 'tragedy of the commons' issue. Historically, this was one reason for compulsory vaccination against smallpox.

New variants are a potential joker in the pack, as there is no guarantee that existing vaccines will be effective against all new variants. Fortunately there is no reason to expect the virus to evolve to become more fatal, since it is seldom in the interest of a disease organism to kill its hosts (again, there are exceptions), but there is a strong evolutionary pressure on the virus to evade vaccines with respect to transmission, and if a new variant can evade the vaccines in one respect, it may well evade them in others, including lethality. I would keep a close eye on the Delta-plus variant.
 
Thanks Mendel, I suspected as much because the rates they come up with don't seem to reflect reality. I brought this study up because a friend of mine (who is anti-vax) presented it to me as a cause for concern.

I then ran her a few quick and rough calculations to indicate vaccine safety compared to Covid death rate. I used the data available for the Netherlands, as that's where I live.

In the Netherlands, there are 17740 deaths due to corona

15 elderly people died shortly after receiving a vaccination. Lareb (side effects reporting center in NL) states that they see no connection between the vaccination and the deaths, since they were frail and elderly people. But for the sake of this calculation, we'll use 15 deaths anyway.

14.3 million peeps have received at least one dose of vaccination.

So 15 out of 14.300.000 is 0.0001% chance of dying of corona due to vaccination.

About 17 million peeps live in the Netherlands. 1682773 of them contracted Corona, of which 17740 died due to Covid.
So 1.1 percent of the infected population died.

0.0001% or 1.1 %. Which are the better odds? You have a factor 10.000 better chance of surviving vaccination than Corona.


I hope that's an accurate enough indication of the situation.

The calculation is not wrong, but there are two different cases. One case is that someone gets injected with the vaccin (voluntarily). The other case is the one where you catch the virus involuntarily (by chance). Both can give you problems (chance), but the premise is very different.
 
The calculation is not wrong, but there are two different cases. One case is that someone gets injected with the vaccin (voluntarily). The other case is the one where you catch the virus involuntarily (by chance). Both can give you problems (chance), but the premise is very different.
Right.. I do have both groups represented in my calculation.. is there anything you suggest I should change?
 
the paper has been retracted
1625317437366.png
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/693/htm





Article:
A study looking at the impacts of covid-19 vaccination—condemned by other scientists as seriously flawed and irresponsible—has now sparked a mutiny of sorts. This past week, several well-respected researchers have resigned from their involvement in the journal that published the paper, which argued that vaccines are killing almost as many people as they’re saving from the pandemic. Today, the paper was retracted.

.....
In their notice, they pointed to “several errors that fundamentally affect the interpretation of the findings,” including the misrepresentation of the Netherlands’ vaccine safety data. The editors also noted that the authors were asked to respond to the criticisms made of their paper, but “were not able to do so satisfactorily.” The paper was then retracted under their protest.
 
the paper has been retracted
1625317437366.png
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/693/htm





Article:
A study looking at the impacts of covid-19 vaccination—condemned by other scientists as seriously flawed and irresponsible—has now sparked a mutiny of sorts. This past week, several well-respected researchers have resigned from their involvement in the journal that published the paper, which argued that vaccines are killing almost as many people as they’re saving from the pandemic. Today, the paper was retracted.

.....
In their notice, they pointed to “several errors that fundamentally affect the interpretation of the findings,” including the misrepresentation of the Netherlands’ vaccine safety data. The editors also noted that the authors were asked to respond to the criticisms made of their paper, but “were not able to do so satisfactorily.” The paper was then retracted under their protest.
Thanks for posting this, Diedre. I would suggest an edit to the initial post by tithe original poster or a staff member pointing out the retraction, for the sake of those who might not read this far.
 
Thanks for posting this, Diedre. I would suggest an edit to the initial post by tithe original poster or a staff member pointing out the retraction, for the sake of those who might not read this far.
yea i contacted the mods already about that.
 
I'm all for retracting dangerous nonsense, but in many ways the damage is done and the retracted paper is now free to circulate on the Internets forever, with the added imprimatur of being The Paper They Do Not Want You To Read and all that garbage.

On the off chance that editors of journals are reading this, retraction is better than nothing, more responsible vetting before publication would be even better.
 
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